An earlier project with a challenging client quickly became a vast source of knowledge. Knowledge of what NOT to do. Here’s one example.
This client was challenging to work with, because they wanted everything. They didn’t believe in a MVP, so in their first release of Salesforce, they wanted
- A replacement of their existing 10 year old custom CRM (which I previously built years before using PHP)
- New functionality and processes to manage their daily operations
- An integration with an upcoming web portal, which wasn’t fully designed yet.
They were persistent with any push-back. “All of this is mission critical!”, “We cannot launch anything unless we launch everything!” and so on. Thus, foolishly and naively, I agreed to help design and implement it.
I just wanted to please my client. I believed in their success and felt they could handle the change. Boy was I wrong.
Many months later, each project was only partially completed. They kept adding new requirements. Internal staff couldn’t agree on certain processes. New ones had to be created, and so on.
The pile kept adding up, they never actually launched anything, and I was eventually pulled off the project.
The takeaway
There’s a reason why people constantly chant “MVP”. It comes from past experiences, and past bruises.
Learn from my mistakes. Design and launch an MVP first. Then refine and enhance from there.